There is some debate about the authorship of the speech. Don Watson has claimed that he wrote it, as he wrote all of Keating’s speeches. Keating denies this, saying that on that “historic occasion” he put away Watson’s prepared speech and spoke his own words, from the heart. Whoever the author, it was a powerful address. Keating encapsulated the historical injustices suffered by Indigenous Australians in a stark summary: “It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me?”
Notably, Keating leads this catalogue of suffering with the primary act of colonial violence which allowed the other injustices to follow: “We took the traditional lands.” Notably, too, the actors in this historical and ongoing tragedy are “us”, non-Indigenous Australians, and our actions are enabled by ignorance, prejudice and an inhumane failure of imagination.
Keating’s speech responded to a growing public recognition of the wrongs suffered by Indigenous Australians. The landmark Mabo decision was handed down by the High Court of Australia in June 1992, recognising the legality of the land rights which Aborigines had claimed from the moment of dispossession. The year also saw ongoing public debate in the aftermath of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Keating’s achievement was to take this growing recognition of suffering and to lay the blame squarely on non-Indigenous Australians – we didn’t know, but we should have.
